


Life on Marx

by executrix



Category: Blake's 7, The Man in the High Castle (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-19 16:56:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20213155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: Frank Frink doesn't know whether he's crazy, in a coma, or slipped forward in time. All he knows is that he's got a movie to deliver.





	Life on Marx

1  
Frank Frink walked into the bar. It was a one-story shed located close to the vast length of the one-story factory and the one-story warehouse, an industrial alimentary canal that led to the one-story spaceport. The whole town seemed to be allergic to stairs.

Frank felt obscurely grateful that his head was still attached. He wasn’t sure why. He’d had hangovers like that before, but he still hadn’t had as many as one drink. 

About half the benches at long tables were occupied by tired-looking men wearing canvas pants and striped gray workshirts. The other half were occupied by tired-looking men wearing khaki jumpsuits with green vests on top. 

However, there was one round table in the center of the room, and it was occupied by the man that, Frank was betting a lot on, was the man he was there to meet. His clothes didn’t look like the suits that the bosses wore at home, but they looked expensive. “Wilmer Stubbs?” the man asked, in a baritone that struck sparks from an anvil. 

Frank rolled his tweed cap into a burrito of humility, and hung his head. “Mr. Pravodoij, sir?”

“That’s right. Well, sit down.” The man, with an evident lifetime of getting what he wanted, raised his hand. “Your best bottle,” he said. The bottle arrived, with two glasses. The man carefully poured half an inch into his own glass, drank it, grimaced, and filled Frank’s glass. Frank took a long swallow—it was like sour bread with pepper and caraway seeds.

“You’ve worked as a foreman before?”

“Yes, sir, at a machine shop. And done a lot of engineering.” Frank noticed that the man’s hands were roughened a little; maybe he spent some time in a lab or a design shop. “Not school stuff, of course, but I came up with a few things that made the shop run better.”

“And when you were a foreman, how many men were under you?”

“Five or six, depending on the shift.” 

“Well, we’d be taking a big chance on you—there are fifty men per shift, on each production line.”

“I’ll do my best, sir.” Frank paused, hoping that Pravodoij wasn’t enough of a Method actor to demand to see the tools in Frank’s satchel to see if they were well-cared-for. Because someone who was looking for it might see the small metal canister. Even someone who wasn’t looking for it might wonder what it was doing in a workman’s bag. 

“The last two didn’t work out, so we’ll take a chance on you. Come on, I’ll take you to the barracks.” He briskly tapped the cork back into the bottle, and took the bottle from the table—it’d been paid for, after all, and he might as well give it to Vila. He thought, for a second, that he was also bringing Vila a puppy. He followed me home! Yes, you can keep him! For the time being, at any rate.

If someone was looking, they might have seen that, after the first klick, they weren’t going in the direction of the barracks. They got past the company store, and the machine shop, and then…there wasn’t much of anything, and they just had to hope that the security cameras didn’t get anything useful.

“I’m not really…”

“You’re Frank Frink. I know.”

“And you’re Blake? Roj Blake?” Frank said, trying to be fair to someone who couldn’t help being named Blake, couldn’t help having the same name as a fucking NAZI that his girl liked better than him…

“Ah, no, our leader couldn’t be spared for this tedious little mission. It was clear that I was the man for job, as I would have no compunction about killing you if you turned out to be a Federation spy. And if you were—and quick on the draw—our happy band of brothers would adjust to doing without me.”

That, Frank thought, sounded about right for all the Resistance groups he’d gotten tangled up with. 

The man put down the bottle, pushed up the sleeve of his peculiar suit, and took off one of the bracelets clanking inside the sleeve and handed it to Frank. “Have you ever teleported before?”

“What—no. I thought that was just in those scifi pulps.”

“This first trip may furnish you with another view of that rotgut, but you’ll get used to it.” 

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, didn’t they say? The Liberator. It’s a spaceship.”

Frank flinched. Weren’t rockets a Wehrmacht monopoly? What the hell had he gotten himself into?

2  
Frank looked wildly around the teleport bay, and took a gulp from the liquor bottle. He was escorted to the flight deck (although not before Vila placed the bottle into protective custody) and had his hand comprehensively shaken and his back slapped. 

“May I see it?” Blake asked.

Frank reached into his satchel and took out the small, flat tin. He opened it, unwound a few inches of the film, and held it up by the leader. “’The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,’” he said. “Yeah, I don’t know why it’s called that either.” 

“I’ve never seen a book like that,” Gan said. “How do you read it?”

“No, it’s a movie…a film…cinema…kino….don’t you have those here?”

“Celluloid film!” Orac piped up. “Highly flammable! Terribly imprudent!”

“You watch it on a screen,” Frank said. “Like…that?” he said, gesturing toward Zen’s display.

+I think NOT+ Zen said. 

“All right, a wall, or a bedsheet or something,” Frank said. “That’s the easy part. Everyplace they sent out the movie, though, there was a projector.”

“Some sort of mechanical device, I take it?” Avon said. Frank nodded. “Oh, well, then, leave it with me. Not the film—don’t be alarmed--I mean that I’ll sort something out.”

“You need a lamp,” Frank said. “A light bulb, if you see what I mean. Two reels, with sprockets. A feeder and a take-up reel. The film passes through a gate—with a motor--and the light shines through it. A lens.”

“Frank, we’re so glad that we can help you with your mission,” Blake said. “It’s nearly dinner time, if you would like to clean up and rest a bit in the Guest Quarters. Cally, would you be so kind as to escort him?”

“Welcome!” Cally said. “You’ve been in the Teleport Bay already, of course. We call this the Flight Deck. Follow me…”

Gan and Vila exchanged a look, then shrugged. The Guest Quarters were not that way, but Cally’s cabin was.

{{We are grateful that you are doing this work. You are very brave.}}

“Half the time I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing. Wait, how did you do that, anyway? Is it some kind of trick?”

{{It is perfectly natural—for me. I am not Terran. I am an Auron, and we Auronar can send our thoughts to others. Our scientists are working on completing the cycle, to be able to receive the thoughts of others, but so far their attempts have not succeeded.}}

“This is my room,” she said. He looked around: the austere furniture was probably Issue of some Government or other, but there were enough colorful objects to show that someone lived here, and they were odd enough to Frank’s eyes to make it clear that she wasn’t the girl next door. “I know it can be overwhelming, going from mission to mission.” {{And lonely. Are you lonely? Are you frightened? Can I help you?}}

“I’m…yeah. Kind of at loose ends. Tell me more about your cell. Your rocket looks awfully big. You must have—dozens? hundreds? of partisans? I bet you’d never be lonely in a crowd like that. But it must be awfully hard to run.”

Cally laughed. “It *is* a very large ship, but you’ve already met all of us.”

“Are you kidding me? The people living lives of quiet desperation would stand up and fight in a minute if they could get whisked away from the battle on a ship like this.”

“There is no shortage of danger, even on the ship. Federation ships have frequently attacked us. And even those in very desperate straits cling to life. But…I’m telling you this second-hand, you might say. I joined the crew after Blake and Jenna and Avon had been exiled from Earth. Blake led a revolt on the prison ship taking them to Cygnus Alpha. The revolt failed, and Blake and the other two were sentenced to death, as ringleaders. Obviously the sentence was not carried out, because they seized this ship and dedicated it to the struggle. Then Blake launched a mission to Cygnus Alpha to rescue the rest of the exiles, but in the event only Gan and Vila joined the crew. I myself joined Blake when I became the sole survivor of my resistance group on Saurian Major.” 

“God, I’m sorry,” Frank said, resting his hand on hers. “Losing them all. I know how tough that is.”

{{This is our life. As Vila would say, ‘some life, eh?’ Every day we stay alive is another act of rebellion, but the mere fact of survival makes us feel that we have failed.}} “It’s nearly dinner time, and I’m sure the others are longing to speak to you. And then you must be tired. Have some food, and then you can wash up and have a sleep.” {{I have a fresher unit built in to my cabin. The bathing facilities for the guest cabins are shared.}}

“Thanks for letting me know,” Frank said. “That’s terribly important.”

They walked down the corridor. Cally took Frank’s hand. {{In this life of ours, we take our pleasures where we can and our comforts where we find them.}}

3  
“Blake hasn’t made up his mind yet if you’re supposed to learn how to work the teleport, but that’s all right ‘cos I can do it practically in my sleep, it’s a doddle, but I couldn’t explain to you how to do it.”

Frank took the sketchpad out of his pocket and started copying the large painting fastened to the wall behind the teleport console. “That’s an interesting piece. I don’t think I’ve seen any other artworks on the ship?”

“There’s a story behind that,” Vila began. Frank sighed and settled down on the corner of the console. He was used to rambling anecdotes; after all, Ed has been his best friend his whole life. 

“It was unanimous, wasn’t it? I didn’t want to go to a fancy convo, very elegant it was, Avon didn’t want to go, he never sees the point of anything Blake wants him to do and he extra-super-specially didn’t see the point of going someplace where they wouldn’t let you have a gun. Pacifists, they said they were. We were just supposed to pop down, chat up this boffin, some sort of cryptography lark. Blake said I should go to watch Avon’s back, Avon said he’d rather do it himself with a rear-view mirror than someone who couldn’t find his own arse with both hands and a torch, and the Federation would be waiting there with arrest warrants and bells on. So there we were, Avon nattering away with the boffin, who strolls him into the next room, and it turns out that these two other blokes are a couple of troopers in mufti, and we haven’t got guns and they haven’t either but they’ve certainly got ceramic knives and one of ‘em is going to stab me and we’re rolling round on the floor until Avon reached that painting down from the wall and ripped off the picture wire and throttled him so when we called for teleport I took the picture with me.”

“He saved your life, then? You don’t sound very grateful.”

“Oh, well, we’re always saving each other’s lives, I’ve saved his lots of times an’ all even though I don’t know why.”

4  
Of course Cally had noticed Frank’s heavy limp; they all had. “Our medical technology is much better than you’re used to,” Cally said. “Come to the Medical Unit with me, I can repair that for you.”

“It’s from a bomb,” Frank said. “A bomb that I planted. I killed a lot of people, and most of them were probably innocent. And the one who deserved it the most—he was hurt. Badly hurt. But he didn’t die.” 

{{Another experience that’s like Blake’s. Your murdered family. Your remorse for your enemy’s injury.}} Later on, Frank wondered exactly how goddamn all-fired remorseful Blake was, but the way she saw things was one of the reasons why he almost-loved Cally.

“So it’s a reminder for me. Every day.”

{{Frank, do you think you would forget?}}

“I guess not. Okay, do you need, I don’t know, permission to do it? And, would I be out of commission for a while? A cast, crutches, a wheelchair?”

Cally looked at him oddly. “Of course not. I decide what to do with my time and our resources. There might have to be discussion if there were a medication we had to ration, but that is not the case for the regen unit. And although it will take a few minutes the repair will not require any rehabilitation.”

5  
Frank took a sip of the special Auron vitamin and probiotic tisane, and took a fallback position of cradling the mug to warm his hands. There were no potted plants in the crewroom, which was just as well, he didn’t think they would have survived repeated dosages. (Avon was the only person who refused the tisane on the grounds of disgustingness, and always stalked off dramatically to brew up some Darjeeling. He always left it up to everyone else to tell Cally they didn’t want any either, which they never did.) 

“Yes, Roj, I understand your point about needing military victory before we can do anything else. If you win, you’ve got to be able to keep it. From the point of view of the ordinary working man, they won’t really care whether it’s you or the Federation in charge if they’re still busting their balls every day at the same job, and they still can’t put food on the table or keep a roof over their head. You have to be able to promise them a fair shake and a living wage. And a lot of the people you’ll need, they’ll just go whichever way the wind blows, but don’t think it’ll be easy, getting the guy who owns the factory to turn it over to the guys on the factory floor.”

Cally tipped her head back, taking the last swallow. (This was usually the point at which Vila switched their mugs.) “If we must define the primacy of one factor, it must be justice. The Federation tyranny—the tyranny of the Gestapo and the KPT—Blake, you must be sure that it will never happen again.” {{Tyrants killed your family, both of you. Shouldn’t that predispose you to saying first of all there must be no more dungeons, no more slave pits, no more torture chambers?}}

After an elaborate pantomime of no one being willing to take the last digestive biscuit, Blake took the last digestive biscuit, and bit into it thoughtfully. He had longed for the chance for some really intensive theory discussions, but had anticipated them going rather better. Perhaps he could invite Gan, which might tip the balance. 

6  
“Gan said you’d be in here,” Frank said. “I made some schematics, best I can remember, of a projector.” He spread out the drawings on the countertop, next to…something…that looked to be almost completed. It also looked kind of like Mickey Mouse’s head, except in beige and orange and green plasteel. Instead of an incandescent lamp there were several of what Frank had been told were LEDs. “But, yeah…that’ll work, I think.” 

“They’re beautiful drawings,” Avon said. “The energy, the vibrance of the lines…I couldn’t do that.”

Around the neck and arms of Frank’s ribbed singlet, white lines could be seen, old enough to be shrunken and paled into scars. Which, Avon though, made him fit right in, on a ship where everyone had felt wounds, so they jested at scars. And the round of the biceps was sweet below the broad shoulders. A thick brown leather belt pulled in the waist of a pair of khaki trousers (Avon suspected Frank had poked through the Wardrobe Room until he found a pair that was long enough, and just called it a day.) Frank wasn’t wearing shoes, he padded on the carpet in the kind of red-accented marled wool socks that Frank thought of as the raw material of sock monkeys. The unshod feet afflicted Avon with a spasm of tenderness, and he shivered at the big hands that could draw with such delicacy.

Frank could feel Avon looking at him. He didn’t think Blake would allow any assertions of the droit de seigneur, and anyway he was used to it, Ed had been his best friend his whole life. 

7  
“The *hell*?” Avon said, leading the wedge onto the flight deck. It wasn’t actually even his shift; Blake and Jenna were scheduled to replace Cally and Vila. 

Blake, Jenna, and Avon froze, assessing the scene before them. Frank and Vila grappled near one of the sofas. Gan held Cally overhead, his head tipped back, his arms stretched at full length. As ever, it was necessary to run through the options—double agentry, hallucinogens in the air ducts, possession—but in seconds, they realized that Cally’s melotrope was blasting, and Cally was giggling as Gan spun her through the air and set her down.

The flight deck was littered with beer bottles. There was something on the table that seemed to be a map of a volcanic planet with a sucking chest wound, but turned out to be the remnants of a very large cheese toastie with tomato sauce. 

Vila gave up his struggle against the laws of physics and stopped trying to dip Frank. (“Why should I do the girl’s part?” he’d asked Frank. “I’ll have to lead once you’ve sloped off somewhere else.” And Frank had asked why Vila thought he wasn’t going to stay. Vila said, “’Cos anybody who’s got anywhere else to bugger off to buggers off there, soon’s they get the chance.”) 

Gan started to clear up beer bottles before anyone could say anything about the disorder. Vila gave a theatrical yawn and headed off to sleep. 

8  
Jenna perched on the console where Avon was on teleport duty. His eyebrows flexed approvingly, which was all to the good for her project.

“I’m not best pleased by developments.”

“He’ll be gone soon,” Avon said. “That’s what they all do.”

“I don’t know about that. And that’s a turn-up for the books, you being more optimistic than I am. He’s upset the balance. Now he and Blake and Cally and perhaps Gan are the red-hot politicos. And he and Gan and Vila and perhaps Cally—aliens don’t have grades, do they?—are the hoi polloi.”

Avon automatically reminded her that “hoi” means “the,” and kicked himself because he did have an idea where Jenna was going with all this. He didn’t mention his discontent with the sudden increase in the average height of the crew.

“So if you look at the Venn diagram, that leaves us precisely nowhere. And it’s not a position I like to be in.”

“But perhaps there are positions you would prefer to be in?”

Jenna nodded. “How do you feel about one-night stands?”

“My very favorite duration.”

“Two hours from now?”

It went without saying that it would be one of the guest cabins, they weren’t going to use their own, for chrissake. When the arrived simultaneously, they were each amused to see that Avon had a compartmented tray on top of a set of sheets; Jenna had just stuffed everything into the pillowcase. 

Each had brought condoms, lubricant, and massage oil. Jenna brought her melotrope and a couple of scented candles. Avon brought a lighter (because he had predicted Probability of Scented Candles) and a whipped cream dispenser and a box of chocolates. “Not for topical application,” he said. “Just to eat.” Neither of them brought any kink paraphernalia, because that would be too revealing. To show that it wasn’t worth bothering much, Jenna wore a plain tunic and trousers, with light-blue bra and knickers underneath. She pressed Avon’s fingers to her forearm, where the contraceptive implant could just be felt. He wasn’t worried, though, he had already checked her records in the sick bay. 

After three hours of showing off their repertoire—much like a classical pas de deux of “Look at me! Look at me!” “Yeah? How about this?” “THAT all you got?” and a crash into one another’s arms—and a nap that had been the best sleep they’d had in ages, “That was lovely!” Jenna said. “Let’s never do that again.”

They shook hands on it. After they had loaded the sheets into the laundry chute, Avon said, “You go on ahead. I’ll run the auto-clean.” A few minutes later, thoughtfully munching on an opera cream, he headed back toward the flight deck.

9  
The black and white footage of the sweetly rounded fluffy cloud and the pandemonium it unleashed shocked them into silence. Blake bounded out of his seat, circling the crewroom anxiously. “But how remarkable,” he said. 

“Switch it off,” Gan said. “I don’t want to have to keep seeing it.” The film reached the end, and the loose end flapped, quack-quack-quack.

{{None of us can un-see it}}.

Jenna turned around to hide the tears in her eyes.

“But that’s not true,” Vila said. “I wasn’t in school much, but long enough to get taught that the Domes and that were because of the A-bombs. And they called it that for Andromedans, that’s why there’s taxes on everything, well, unless you’re rich of course, to pay for Space Command, because you can’t trust aliens. Present company excepted.”

“Or if the alternative would be trusting *you*,” Avon said. “You, Vila, are the rising tide that lifts all the boats of estimation of other species.”

“Wait, there are other species?” Frank asked. “I thought that was made up, too. Like teleporting.”

Jenna, lady and master of her face once again, shrugged. “You can swear that *that’s* real.”

“So this—I think you said it was called a moonie?—says that it was human beings who caused the A-War,” Gan said.

“The Axis,” Frank said. “The Nazis, and the Japanese.”

“People did this?” Vila said. “And to other people? I wouldn’t do it to a spider the size of dinner plate.”

“Let’s be fair, Vila,” Avon said. “No doubt they also destroyed a vast quantity of valuable property.”

“Lots of places, there wasn’t one stone, one brick, left on top of another,” Frank said. “The explosion. The burning. And of course the poison afterwards.”

“Buy why?” Gan said. “If you want an empire, don’t you want there to be people to lord it over and treasures to loot?”

“They had a long list of people who didn’t deserve to live,” Frank said. “They thought, they’d just start over with the ones they did think were good enough. Although I don’t know if you’d meet their standards of Aryan purity if you’ve got three heads.” 

Blake drew a long, shuddering breath. “We can’t thank you enough for taking the risks to come here and pass this along. This is—precious. Priceless. When the Neutral Planets see these graphic reminders of the Federation’s lies, it will give them the will to resist.”

10  
“Do you know how to weld?” Cally asked.

“Are you kidding me, lady?”

“Oh. Of course. Well, would you like to help out?” Frank said, “Sure.” They were waiting around for clearance for Frank to deliver the film, a period of time that he found mostly boring. Liberator was certainly big enough to stretch his legs by walking the corridors, but he missed the sepia haze that passed for fresh air and sunlight in San Francisco more than he thought he would.

Cally triggered the communicator in the door. “Vila, it’s me. Frank came along too.”

Before they entered the inner part of the cleanroom Avon had fitted out, they put on tyvek suits, booties, hairnets, and gloves; Vila was already suited up and fitting chips into motherboards. Frank peered at the workbench curiously; electronics had been way, way above his pay grade. He wished he’d had the tiny pencil welding torch, it was very handy.

“It goes faster with three,” Cally said. “Gan comes here on his off-shifts sometime.” 

“What are these?” 

“Extra wotzis for Avon’s deflector thing,” Vila said. “He says, since that’s a post-factory upgrade, the auto-repair won’t work if they get dinged up, so we’ll need spare parts.”

They worked in companionable silence for a while. 

“Don’t tell anyone,” Vila said. Cally and Frank spread their hands in unison: who would they tell?   
“It’s not so bad, this working lark. ‘Course it’s a lot better than rushing about while people try to kill us, but I can’t really get my teeth into a book or a game if I’d nothing else to do all day. If I’ve done something, then having fun feels like a treat. First Avon told me a stupid Delta like me couldn’t build circuit boards—who does he think works in the factories? The Parliamentary Central Committee? Then he bet me two hundred credits I couldn’t do a hundred of these in an hour. I did, of course, then I realized he’d played me like the old pub joanna. And anyway, he could bet me two hundred credits or a million, he’d just steal ‘em out of the treasure room if I won. Which is what I would have done if I’d lost.” Vila tilted his head. “That, or welshed on the bet.”

“Sounds like a factory manager, all right,” Frank said grimly. “He didn’t just speed up the line, he made you think it was your idea.”

“He fancies you rotten, y’know.”

“Earth idioms can be so peculiar!” Cally said. It was the cleanroom, so she couldn’t reach up and put her arm around Frank’s shoulders and squeeze {{It won’t get him anywhere, but at least he’s got good taste.}}

“Servalan’s the Supreme Commander of Space Command. When she can’t be bothered filling out forms in triplicate, she sends Travis to do her dirty work personally. They’re like, Yin and Yang. But instead of one being good and one evil, they’re evil and eviler. Two halves of a rotten walnut. Of course, she’s a she, and well fit, he’s hideous enough to frighten the kiddies with.”

“To be fair, I think he must have been a handsome man, before…”

“Before Blake got to him?”

“Wait, really?” Frank said. “About Blake, I mean, I don’t care if some Gestapo thug or other used to be handsome.”

“He did kill about twenty of Blake’s friends,” Vila said.

Frank wondered if the sparse roster of the Liberator was a function of Blake’s unwillingness to have twenty friends in one place to be slaughtered. 

“Is that what Blake and Avon are?” Frank asked. “Two lines of the same hexagram?”

“Gawd, no,” Vila said. “Except that you could probably put the good parts of them together and come up with a very superior sort of person, you’d be hard-pressed to think of two people that were more two people instead of the same one.”

11  
“Frank doesn’t think you’re all that and a bag of chips,” Vila said.

“That’s all right,” Avon said, pretending to take Vila’s spite for a syrup-bath of sympathy. “I was recently worshipped. That should last me a while.”

12  
Zen provided the coordinates for the planned rendezvous, and photographs, voiceprints, and retinal scans of their contact, Zol Mokso. 

“Are you sure you want to go?” Blake asked. “It’s dangerous, you know. We can take the rendezvous for you.”

“They do want me, specially, because I’ve been accredited. And of course I know it’s dangerous. I can handle it.”

Frank went to the shooting range with Cally and practiced with the Liberator gun that matched his voiceprint, but he wished he had a good old-fashioned Colt .45 even if he had to make it himself.

Frank shook Blake’s hand and hugged Gan (it was Vila’s and Jenna’s sleep shift) and said, “If I don’t come back, thank you for everything.”

At the teleport, Avon said, “Good luck, the pair of you.”

They landed in a clearing just at the appointed time. Five seconds later, Mokso stepped out of the thin stand of trees onto the gravel path. He looked dreadful, pale and shaking. “Do you have it? Do you have it?” 

“Sure,” Frank said, looking around to make sure they were alone but, suddenly, they weren’t. From somewhere—from where? They told Frank the Federation didn’t have teleport—there was a knife at the man’s throat, held by a ghastly girl that must have been one of the mutoids Frank had assumed were Vila’s spook-story inventions. 

“Just let him go, goddammit,” Frank said. “Your business here is with me.” And someone who only could have been Travis stepped out from behind the mutoid, told her to give him the knife, and told Mokso he could run away, which he wasted no time in doing. 

Travis shifted the knife to his Lazeron side and held out his flesh hand, although with a smirk that showed he didn’t expect it to be that easy. “What are you going to do, kill me?” Frank said, and a voice in his head asked, “again?” but he shook it off. 

“Why not? I’ll kill as many of Blake’s scum as I can find, before I get to him.” 

Frank didn’t know much about knife fights, except that they didn’t have any rules, but he’d been in a few punch-ups on Saturday nights. As he analyzed it, he was just a guy, not a soldier or psychopath, but he was a lot bigger and had two arms and two eyes, which had to count for something. 

With two syncopated thumps, the mutoids dropped, showering bits of glass and serum from their leather-bound thoraxes. Travis had to half-turn, and then turn back to see what had happened. Frank held up the knapsack in front of him (thinking that wasn’t it supposed to be good for soldiers to carry Bibles in their pockets, to soak up bullets, and wondering how a Torah scroll would compare to a pocket New Testament for the purpose). He rushed at Travis , staying inside the knife hand, and knocked him to the ground. 

With the knapsack between them, he struggled to pin the Lazeron arm with one of his hands, and to smash Travis’ head on the ground with the other. A knee to Travis’ groin distracted Travis long enough for Frank to pull back enough to reach the gun in his belt.

The mutilated enemy merged with the enemy he had mutilated, and couldn’t they both have tried to give honorable service to whatever empire happened to be the container for their allegiance? Frank holstered his Liberator gun, and got up. “Fuck off,” he said. “You deserve it, but I can’t kill you.” 

Frank turned and walked away, raising his wrist to his mouth. But, before the teleport took effect, Travis aimed his Lazeron. The beam was a square hit on the canister inside his backpack. The canvas and leather burned, and the beam burned through the metal and sparked the film into a molten river. Frank cried out and dropped it, by instinct rather than design, and before he could turn to try to pick it up, he had vanished.

Cally, in her sniper’s nest in a tree sixty yards away, muttered a few colorful Auron expletives, and called for teleport, arriving just a second after Frank. 

Avon, still at the teleport, said, “Well, we got back as many as we sent—always a good thing, often a surprise—but you don’t look best pleased. And you smell like a bonfire.” He peered down at the teleport bay floor, where Frank’s knapsack didn’t appear to be in evidence.

“I failed,” Frank said. “Oh, the man came out all right, and I had my knapsack open and I was going to give it to him. And then he came up behind him, out of nowhere, there was no cover...covered in black, and broken, and with those…those…things with him, like his escorts out of Hell.”

“I killed the two mutoids,” Cally said defensively. “But Travis closed in the distance, I couldn’t get a clean shot without endangering Frank.”

“I had a gun, one of your crazy guns out of the Saturday double-feature, Cally showed me how to use it, I had it in my belt, I didn’t have to reach for my knapsack. And I couldn’t do it. I looked into—he doesn’t even have his other eye. It burned like a furnace of filth and hate. I turned my back to go. I couldn’t kill him. I couldn’t do it.”

“I shouldn’t worry about that if I were you,” Avon said. “If the Liberator were a small country, ‘not killing Travis’ would be our major export.”

“But, Christ,” Frank said. “I came all this way and it’s just…gone.” He fell back until he sat on the floor of the teleport bay, his knees in a picket fence, too desolate to cry. Cally knelt next to him and, wordlessly, put her arm around his shoulders.

“Ah. As it happens, I suspected Orac’s concerns about nitrate film were well-placed. So I had the film digitized. It’s been sent out to every computer with a tarial link. I daresay most worlds won’t know what to make of it, or care particularly about the origins of the Federation, but least the next lot of messengers have been spared the trip.” 

“I think you left out a few steps there, buddy. How did you get it digitized?”

“On an occasion when I happened to be passing your cabin, and I had reason to believe you weren’t in it, I took the canister for a joyride. As I’d already had to build the projector—yes, with your assistance, before you point that out—I simply staged another performance, with an audience of one. Or none, considering that it’s a machine. Then I put the film back in your cabin, which you still weren’t in.”

Fury was enough to shoot Frank to his feet, and he bolted toward the console. “Cocksucker!”

“Not for lack of trying,” Avon said calmly. Frank looked at the painting above the console and, simultaneously, thought that it would be unsporting to fight someone so much older and smaller, and imprudent. Frank stepped back a little. Cally joined him, taking his hand and squeezing it consolingly. 

“Thank you, I guess,” Frank said. 

13  
“Here,” Vila said. “We made this for you. For that thing you do.” 

“Thank you,” Frank said. “It’s beautiful.” And it was—a metal cup, etched with abstract designs and jeweled. 

When Frank could get some wine, or an unreasonable substitute, and he remembered to do it, he went through his very Reformed hybrid of kiddush and kaddish. After all, all his lives had been marked by epic losses, and it was always Friday night someplace.

“Some of those rocks are real,” Vila said. “From the treasure room. It was Avon’s idea,” he conceded. “In case you were ever in a mess and needed the money.”

Frank continued turning over the goblet, in the palms of his hands. “Considering that I spent my whole life in a mess, that’s pretty likely.”

“We don’t know where you’ll be,” Cally said. “Whether they use Reichsmarks, or libracoins or vems…”

“Cally, I’m sorry to go, and sorry to leave you, but you don’t need somebody in the crew” (he stopped himself in time from saying “somebody else” considering that Vila was four feet away) “who won’t or can’t fight.”

{{I’ll miss you, of course. But my life is to always move on, and leave people behind. It’s far less painful to know that they’re going on, and to something good.}}

14  
Frank joined Avalon’s Propaganda Unit. He never carried a weapon again. They made him do guard duty just like everybody else, telling him it was his problem if his principled stance got him killed. 

Frank designed the poster that immediately got pasted to hoardings on dozens of planets. It was an abstract portrait (the mobile mouth and resolute chin somewhat realistic, the other features stylized). The letters B and L were off to one side; the a and e were elongated into eyes, the k a stylized nose. The nimbus of hair shaded off first to gold, then to a horizon of stacked greens.

The posters stayed up for years, bubbled by rain, fading and scratched. They lasted longer than Blake did himself, but then, neither hope nor faith relies on documentation.


End file.
